Bloober Team didn’t have the best start on PlayStation 4 with the abysmal Basement Crawl being so bad that the team completely rewrote the game from scratch in a new engine after it was released. This was followed by Layers of Fear, an inventive take on the horror genre which I really liked when I reviewed it last year, and now we have Observer which will be landing on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on August 15th.
Watching the trailer it’s clear the main influence is Blade Runner with rain swept city streets illuminated by neon signs and an evocative synth soundtrack. It was only at the end of the trailer I realised just how Blade Runner-y the game is, as Detective Dan Lazarski is played by Rutger Hauer. I am now officially very interested in this game.
Here’s the blurb:
The year is 2084. If you somehow survived the Nanophage, odds are you were killed in the War. Those who live have turned to drugs, VR, neural implants — anything to distract themselves from this new reality. You are Daniel Lazarski, an elite neural detective known as an Observer, and part of a corporate-funded police unit whose purpose is to hack and invade suspects’ minds. In this future, anything you think, feel, or remember can be used against you in a court of law.
When you receive a mysterious message from your estranged son, a high-level engineer for the almighty Chiron Corporation, you journey to the Class C slums of Krakow to investigate. But as you hack into the unstable minds of criminals and victims to look for clues, you are forced relive their darkest fears. How far will you go to discover the truth?
Source:Â YouTube
